Category Archives: Amazing Insight

Listening to this podcast, I was transported to my childhood, to a geography of bakeries – of freshly baked bread that earned my community the moniker ‘macapao’ to more hybrid offerings – springs rolls doused in crimson Szechwan sauce that no one in the Sichuan I visited this summer would recognise and the most perfect salted wafers. More than the food, it was the cadence of speech that called to me in the podcast, the tangential telling of stories, the “I tell you” and “men’.

As I ponder the question of belonging and the irrelevance of nationalism except for the most prosaic and political purposes, I realise that, new yuppie cafes and restobars notwithstanding, it is this corner of the world, this suburb where even the grocer spoke to us in English, is where I can claim to somehow forever belong to. At heart, I am a citizen of Bandra.

***

I sent a message about dance classes for the children to the wrong member of the Indian ladiz whatsapp group of my estate.

“Who is this?” she asked.

“C, from the Indian whatsapp group,” I replied.

“C is not an Indian name. Are you Indian?”

“Yes.”

“But were you born in Hong Kong.?”

“No.”

“Which tower do you live in?” As if I would fake being Indian to be a member of this whatsapp group.

Isn’t it curious how the people who demand patriotism from minorities never also fail to other us?

***

“Where are you from?” My children are asked.

“Hong Kong.”

“No where are you really from?”

They name the suburb of Hong Kong we live in.

My children’s geography of taste is also different. When they are in India, they tire of the local food and ask grandma, “can we get siu mai?”

***

I read that Portugal is one of the few European countries soliciting migrants.

“Hmmm, maybe I should apply, then at least I don’t have to explain my name.”

“Who do you have to explain your name to?” my Indian colleague asks in surprise.

I roll my eyes. The idea of India has grown smaller and smaller.

***

I listen to this podcast and learn that middle-class Muslims in India are thinking twice about giving their children Muslim names to avoid the inevitable bullying on the playground.

This is what we have come to.

***

Hong Kong was where I lost both my religion and nationalism (nationalism to my mind is a kind of religion in the “opiate of the masses” sense anyway). I recall reading about an artist who was invited to participate in the national pavilion of another country and her saying that she accepted the invitation expressly because it was not linked to national boundaries (I believe it was Dayanita Singh at the German pavilion of the 2013 Venice Bienale but I can’t be sure). I remember thinking that this was a sensibility I aspire to, even as I struggle not to root for countries at the Olympics and World Cup.

Five years ago, I wrote about how my sense of nationalism has faded. What has changed since then or while my affinity to the idea of the nation has eroded, ironically at a time when the idea of Hong Kong nationalism has been floated, my sense of belonging to certain places, my safe places – one dot in the corner of India’s west coast and one dot on China’s southern coast – has solidified.

10 March is Tibetan National Uprising day. A friend posted this poem on Facebook:

The Tibetan in Mumbai
is not a foreigner.

He is a cook
at a Chinese takeaway.
They think he is Chinese
run away from Beijing.

He sells sweaters in summer
in the shade of the Parel Bridge.
They think he is some retired Bahadur.

The Tibetan in Mumbai
abuses in Bambaya Hindi,
with a slight Tibetan accent
and during vocabulary emergencies
he naturally runs into Tibetan.
That’s when the Parsis laugh.

The Tibetan in Mumbai
likes to flip through the MID-DAY,
loves FM, but doesn’t expect
a Tibetan song.

He catches the bus at a signal,
jumps into a running train,
walks into a long dark gully
and nestles in his kholi.

He gets angry
when they laugh at him
“ching-chong-ping-pong”.

The Tibetan in Mumbai
is now tired,
wants some sleep and a dream.
On the 11pm Virar Fast,
he goes to the Himalayas.
The 8.05am Fast Local
brings him back to Churchgate
into the Metro: a New Empire.

— Tenzin Tsundue

It’s a reminder of the alienation that exiles feel. And the complicity of ‘locals’ in that.

Strangely, when I read the poem, my dominant feeling was homesickness. [And I fully recognize here that there is no parity between my homesickness and that of the Tibetan in exile. My homesickness is marked by the transnational privilege to return – home for me is a just a flight away, an expensive one that precludes frequent returns, but the possibility is open.]

There was a time when this homesickeness would trouble me, not for the fact of it, but because when I moved to Hong Kong, I felt the need to pick a side. And after five years in Hong Kong I picked Hong Kong. The end. Or so I thought.

Last month, I gave a lecture on Salman Rushdie’s essay Imaginary Homelands, in which he talks about writing in the diaspora. I reflected on an incident that happened when I was in Bombay in December. Or rather, as I was leaving Bombay. As the plane was taking off, I pointed out the city spread out below us to Nene who was peering out of the airplane window. Suddenly, I trailed off. V, who was sitting in the row behind us, poked me and whispered, “Are you crying?” And I realised that I was. Ten years after leaving Bombay, I realised that some roots are never severed. Something is always left behind.

I have finally realised that home can be two or more places. On does not have to pick a side. When I leave Hong Kong, there will be a part of me that will keen for it. I have put down roots here too. My ties to Bombay are the ties of birth, the ties of familiarity, of blending in, of roads that can be navigated unconsciously. My ties to Hong Kong are the comfort of safety and ease, the exhileration of the aesthetic beauty of the skyline and the buzz of the international, the jolt of the strange, and the nostalgia of the early years of marriage and learning to be an adult. If Bombay is family, Hong Kong is a friend.

I lived two years in Hyderabad too. I should have put down roots there. But I didn’t. The city didn’t take to me and I to it. I fled every opportunity I could, and when I had no reason to be there any longer, I packed my things and never looked back.

With whom did you make the most worthwhile connections in 2012?connect [LIVE]: This post is part of Weverb12

This is a toughie. I can easily cite who I did not make worthwhile connections with:

My husband

Close friends

Even my mom to some extent

My colleagues

My helpers

As most of you know by now, this has been the year of angst and irritation. People mostly got on my nerves. I probably got on theirs. Worthwhile connections were lacking.

Mainly, I forged a closer relationship with my kids. I realised I can stomach their company in larger doses than I can most adults. This is a complete turnaround from someone who would run a mile from kids. I am now the person who goes goo-goo-gaa-gaa at babies in the MTR. Stranger things have happened (NOT). Apart from genuinely enjoying my interactions with my children, as I realised on Christmas, they crowd out the need for other people and paint the grotesqueness of many adult interactions in sharp relief.

And if my children hadn’t caused me to isolate myself, Hong Kong encourages it too. One of the pitfalls of life in Hong Kong is that people wrap themselves into their own cocoons and the efficiency of the infrastructure and the way the city functions means one doesn’t need people in the way that one does in India, for example. So one is forced to consider whether one actually wants people. I fully recognise that this is a dangerous game to play whereby one could find oneself very alone and isolated later in life or if one moves away from Hong Kong.

But for the here and now, this year I found that I preferred solitude and my own company more than anything. For example, the week that V was away at the end of the year, I did a couple of things myself and enjoyed the experience immensely. I went to an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s work and loved taking my time and absorbing it at my own pace, reading every caption as is my want without feeling guilty about making others wait. And on Saturday night, I went to a HK Philharmonic concert, making a conscious choice not to call friends, and again, I loved being alone. I could space out and let the music wash over me without feeling the need to make conversation or think about whether anyone else was entertained. I could go to the loo twice during the interval without feeling embarrassed about my small bladder. At the end of it, I remember thinking how this was so much more worthwhile than doing than drinks and dinner. On a side note, I’ve discovered I enjoy Ravel – the gypsy notes in his music resonate with me – and I find solos trying.

I’d like to say that I’m going to make more connections in the coming year, but I think I need to wallow in solitude more. I need to cast of the cloak of needing people and being anxious about company. One of the wonders of Hong Kong is that one is free to do things alone. So, if anything, I’m hoping to isolate myself more and keep my interactions with people light.

*We were spoofing a Cher song. Are you stroganoff to live without me? Stroganoff!

What made you feel powerful in 2012?empower [HOPE]: this post is part of Weverb2012

Thinking back to the start of the year, when Mimi had just been born, some of times I felt most empowered were during the darkest days of the first three months. Particularly when a day after we had been discharged from hospital, a check-up revealed Mimi had high jaundice levels and had to go back to hospital for blue light treatment.

I had to stay with her, sleeping on a fold-up round-the-clock, which was no joke for someone who had just had a c-sec. Apart from one night-time stretch when I panicked, trying to calm a wailing Mimi and change her diaper in that incubator thingie, I was surprised at how well I managed the feeding, sleeping, staggering to gross common toilet, making calls to V from corner of said toilet (the only place I got phone reception), etc. I would never have thought myself capable of camping out on a fold-out bed, and leaping to the demands of a newborn with a huge cut in my stomach but I rose to the occasion (literally).

And later, during one dreadful night when V was away on work, and I got food poisoning, Benji dropped the iPad on his foot and it turned blue, and I had to keep waking to feed Mimi and I managed to do all this and live to host a visiting friend the next day, I knew I had depths of strength I hadn’t imagined. More recently, during another bad night when Mimi was really ill and I slept with her cuddled in the crook of my arm, getting a couple of hours sleep, before heading to work, I knew I still had it in me.

I’m not one of those people that believes that one should welcome misfortune because it makes you stronger. Bad times suck. But I was proud of how I handled those physically and emotionally exhausting days and they taught me that I was stronger than I thought.

Sometime ago, V commented that childhood is the time we all hark back to. This was certainly true for me until my 20s. I remember doing a simple personality quiz that diagnosed me as stuck in the period from 5-12 and it struck me as very accurate.

In my 30s now, I am more realistic about my childhood. I definitely had a good childhood. A comfortable one, with necessities and a lot of extras provided, and a very loving family environment. I grew up in a building surrounded by friends and have amazing memories of summer holidays spent almost entirely downstairs. But I did have my insecurities as a child. In my first and second standard of primary school, I was practically friendless. I found secondary school extremely boring, although friends made up for it. I was mentally precocious but physically an awkward teenager.

The time I hark back to now is my early 20s. My personality was formed. I was confident in my looks. I was secure in my friendships. The period from 21-24 in particular was my heyday. I was the most social and confident I have ever been. I looked the best I ever have. I attracted people, friends and lovers. It was a time of romance, intense friendships, experimentation and joie de vivre.

I don’t necessarily want to go back to those heady days – though I wouldn’t mind going back to those looks – but that period is the touchstone of who I am.

What inspirational quote would you associate with this past year for you?

I have three quotes that resonated with me this past year

1. As you know, I have had struggles in my marriage this year. The quote below put a lot of things in perspective for me. It reminded me of something a priest once said to me about love being a gift you give and not something you take. Somewhere in these seven years, I stopped being so willing about giving, about backing down. To give, for me is an act of trust, and I stopped trusting. This quote reminded me of the idea that is actually the basis of the Christian faith, that to win you have to lose.

“When it comes to winning and losing, I think there are three kinds of marriages. In the first kind of marriage, both spouses are competing to win, and it’s a duel to the death. Husbands and wives are armed with a vast arsenal, ranging from fists, to words, to silence. These are the marriages that destroy. Spouses destroy each other, and, in the process, they destroy the peace of their children. In fact, the destruction is so complete that research tells us it is better for children to have divorced parents than warring parents. These marriages account for most of the fifty percent of marriages that fail, and then some. The second kind of marriage is ripe with winning and losing, but the roles are set, and the loser is always the same spouse. These are the truly abusive marriages, the ones in which one spouse dominates, the other submits, and in the process, both husband and wife are stripped of their dignity. These are the marriages of addicts and enablers, tyrants and slaves, and they may be the saddest marriages of all.

But there is a third kind of marriage. The third kind of marriage is not perfect, not even close. But a decision has been made, and two people have decided to love each other to the limit, and to sacrifice the most important thing of all—themselves. In these marriages, losing becomes a way of life, a competition to see who can listen to, care for, serve, forgive, and accept the other the most. The marriage becomes a competition to see who can change in ways that are most healing to the other, to see who can give of themselves in ways that most increase the dignity and strength of the other. These marriages form people who can be small and humble and merciful and loving and peaceful.”

2. As we weigh up moving to India, I am once again struggling with where I belong. I fear that in eschewing being a foreigner in a foreign land, I will land up in the more disturbing position of being a foreigner in my own land, or worse, realising that I never had my own land. This quote offers a different perspective to the idea of being rooted to places.

“Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it’s not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you’ve been to. I’m not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don’t have to be like anyone else. I’m walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.” (From The Speckled People, A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood)

3. Related to quote 1, the following quote provides a strategy for me. I need to learn to back down, and one of the ways to do that is to let things go, to not dwell.

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days… Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me… So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling.(Aldous Huxley, The Rainbow)

What blog/book/article spoke to you the most in 2012?

Ok so there are a lot book-related prompts in this series, which is fine because I have a lot of book-related posts to get through. I mentioned in this post that one of my firsts this year has been reading a book on economics. Poor Economics not only gave me the confidence to read out of my comfort zone, it also answered many of the very basic questions and redressed misconcpetions I had (and I suspect many of you have) about poverty (are poor people always hungry? why do poor people have so many children? can anything be done to help them or is poverty eradication a dream?).

Some takeaways:

Hunger

– There is enough food in the world so that no one needs to be hungry.

– Distribution of food, however, is a problem.

– Barring emergencies, even those below the poverty line would be able to meet basic calorie needs by living on a diet of banana and potato.

– However, understandably, poor people do not want to only eat banana and potato. Also, when they get a bit more money, they prefer to spend it on other things or on tastier food.

– Moral: Poor people are human beings like you and I and don’t want to eat only banana and potatoes.

Health

– Just like the rest of us, poor people make healthcare choices based on what they believe works.

– Thus, stuff that shows quick results (like antibiotics, injections etc) are more popular than long-term stuff like vaccines.

– There is an element of conscious choice involved. Poor people are not ignoramuses (ignorami?) led to the slaughter by devious but more enlightened souls (not always, anyway). They decide what works for them and choose things that give them hope (even when that means faith-healers over hospitals that tell them that there is nothing to be done for a family member suffering from AIDS). This ties into a irate discussion I engaged in on an online forum with a woman who posted some article on how big, bad Nestle conned these poor, dumb poor people into choosing formula over breastmilk. Why is it always assumed the poor are so easily misled? Why does it never enter anyone’s head that a mother with less income might decide she prefers what she perceives to be an easier option, just like higher income mothers (though none of those mothers might like to admit the reasons behind their choice to a health-case worker, for example).

– Just like us, they can be incentivized to choose what Someone Who Knows Better thinks is best. This may be patronizing, but it happens to all of us, just that we don’t know it.

Education

– Even rubbish education, helps. So rubbish government schools are better than nothing.

– And again, it is often the poor, including poor children, choosing not to go to them because they are rubbish and thus perceived to offer no significant benefit.

– However, good education helps more.

– The focus should be on ensuring that children are really learning at every stage, even if this means at the end of 10 years, they have learnt less than children in more privileged schools. Quality, not quantity.

Population

– Do larger families really breed poverty? Or is there a good reason poor people choose to have large families?

– If saving is compared to support from children in old age, support from children trumps saving. To increase the odds of said support, more children are needed. Ergo.

Microcredit

– Is microcredit the magic bullet that will pull people out of poverty? No. But it does help. It needs to be complemented by other measures and it needs to be fine-tuned to make it more effective.

– Microinsurance would also be very helpful but no private company has figured out how to make the numbers work. The poor would benefit a lot from being insured against huge health events, weather incidents, etc. There might be a role for the government here.

– Stress is not some rich man’s disease. The poor get stressed too. A study measured the cortisol level of poor people and found it to be quite high. Some of them are so stressed and depressed they cannot function effectively enough to take steps to better their lives.

Through all this, the dominant message I got was – the poor are just like you and me. If you and I can’t do what we know is the right thing for our lives (each more healthy, save, be disciplined at work) when we have a lot of training wheels and guard rails put in place for us so seamlessly that we don’t realise they exist, why do we expect people who live in much more challenging situations to do so? Policies to help the poor might do well to realise that poor people are people first, just like everyone else and subject to the same vagaries of human nature that we all are.

The book concludes that there is hope for the poor if we can persist in devising and tweaking ways to help based on situations on the ground, rather than looking, as economists are want to do, at the macro.

Technology has made our lives easier. It has also spawned new forms of laziness.

For example, too lazy to Google. The answer to everything is on Google. Increasingly Google and the Internet remind me of the idea of God – an entity you go to for answers, the key being to ask the right question. Ask and you shall know.

With the Internet now extendable to mobile phones, if anyone has a question about anything, people normally whip out their phone to do a quick google.

However, I’ve noticed that following the initial flurry of enthusiasm for proactive but quick searches for answers to their problems, people seem to have settled back into inertia. So I’ve noticed that people will do blog posts or comment on blogs making statements that could easily be verified (or not) by googling beforehand but they don’t (preferring to say “someone sometime ago said” and its variants).

And I’ve also noticed that sometimes I’m one of these people. So in the course of work, I grammar questions often come up. Instead of googling for the answers, I sometimes just ask MinCat who’s on chat nearly all the time I am. I could google and go through a couple of searches to find a page that answered my question, but it’s easier to just ask a real live person who I presume has the answers.

And then, there’s Facebook. It has this inexplicable system whereby suddenly a photo you posted ages ago is resurrected and people keep commenting on it. If it’s a photo of your baby, the comments will be a variation of “so cute”. I fully appreciate people appreciating my baby but how to respond to these comments. Okay, I know I should be saying “thanks” but apparently I’m too lazy for that (I resort to a “group thanks”). MinCat pointed out that the Facebook solution is to “like” these kinds of comments. And then I confessed sheepishly that I’ve become too lazy to “like”.

There are probably new depths of sloth I can descend to. Let technology throw a new ball at me and I will respond with a new way I am too lazy to use it.

So the other day the topic of townies came up and someone said how they are not that bad and she had friends from town (because town is a place on its very own, you know, distinguished from the suburbs, which were never referred to as the burbs except twice in trying-too-hard newspaper articles) and that they are more classy.

I agree they are not that bad and even I had townie friends and …erm. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they are more classy.

Yes, many of them had grown up with Shakespeare lining their parents’ bookshelves (the rarified air around which they then absorbed in a process similar to osmosis) and their folks were often senior executives of some firm if not historically moneyed and went to the NCPA on a regular basis and they knew how to use all the right forks (I assume, because isn’t that what classy people are supposed to know? Or was Pretty Woman wrong?). Mostly though, they went to all the right schools and these schools gave them what I would politely describe as “confidence” except I’m not polite so I’m going to call it what it really is, which is, a sense of entitlement.

My cousin who went to one of the schools that geographically just about fell into what could legitimately be considered town once told me that when they behaved badly, one teacher would say something on the lines of: “Children behave. If your parents wanted you to be like this, they would have sent you to an SSC school.” So you can imagine the little glow of smugness that each of these students carried with them into the world, no matter what they actually were. (I therefore have a horror of sending my child to elite private schools of this kind lest they grow up to be exactly the kind of insufferables that used to peeve me in my childhood. My own cousin was a rare exception and I like to think that association with my sister and I was what saved her. I can count on one hand the number of other exceptions I know and be still left with two fingers. You do the math.)

There is, of course, a difference between ICSC schools and town. But the products of both share some characteristics and the big one is this sense that no matter what, they are better than someone out there. The ICSC kids will always be better than the SSC kids. And the townies will always be better than those who had the misfortune of living in the suburbs. By definition. Through no effort of their own. The worst offenders are, you can imagine, the townies who went to ICSC schools, which is almost all of them because I’m not sure if any SSC schools in town. Or at least which the kind of townies one would meet would go to.

Knowing that there is someone out there you are better than (which to some extent every middle-class person in India has the satisfaction of knowing because, well, slum-dwellers etc. but then again, the really poor don’t count because they are invisible) is a powerful thing. It enables you to walk into any room convinced you are good enough for it. There are few things that intimidate one, I’d imagine, and the schools teach you to brazen those out, drawing on one’s inner conviction that one is best because one went to the best school, didn’t one? (My school was clearly not good enough to stop me from using this “one” sentence construction. Okay, let’s not blame my school for that. On second thoughts, let’s.) And also, if one had a moment of self-doubt, one could draw on the myriad personal connections one had with similarly entitled people by virtue of living in town.

The further south you go, the worse it is. People who live in Dadar are least town-like, though I was surprised to note that they still consider themselves town. Mahim is like no-man’s land because they don’t want to see themselves as living in the suburbs (and technically they’re not) but no townie would see Mahim as town.

Most surburban resident’s first encounter with townies happens in college. Before that you might have had the odd family friend or relative who lived there and they would always be nice to you, but when you went to college you realised that was probably only because of the prior relationship and most likely extended only in that context (of family visit; they would quite possibly be cringingly embarrassed if they encountered you sans family in the street when they were with their friends). In college, the townies seemed to walk about like the anointed ones, in little cliques of perfumed stylishness. They answered questions in class boldly, not embarrassed in the least to monopolise classroom discussions. None of this is bad in itself. The bad is that they gave off this – in varying degrees of intensity – vibe that they thought themselves to be The Shit.

Sometimes the sense of entitlement took the form of outright selfishness. Like this once when a townie from one of the exalted cliques sat next to a friend of mine and actually made conversation. My friend was just thinking how nice and non-stuck-up she was. The townie hadn’t brought her textbook so my friend shared hers. Then, the prof started asking for people to read out parts in the play and both my friend and the townie put their hands up to volunteer. The townie happened to get picked, which is fine. What happened next, though, is classic. She just picked up my friend’s textbook, without so much as a by-your-leave, stood up (so my friend didn’t have a textbook) and started reading from it. Thereafter, she never spoke to me friend again or even acknowledged her existence with so much as a raised eyebrow.

When my friend told me about this, I was not that surprised. It seemed like a townie thing to do. Talking to the little girl from the suburbs is a novelty that also serves a purpose but her existence can be conveniently forgotten too. No thank you when she sat down either. That’s class for you.

I know this sounds a lot like sour grapes and is kind of ironic, because I grew up in Bandra and we’re kind of accused of being snobbish ourselves. But I’d like to think we’re not that bad. That our sense of pride in and enjoyment of where we live does not result in us seeing people from further north as the little people leave alone people who can be used and ignored at will.

That’s not to say I didn’t have townie friends. By my third year in college I did. Initially, there was this slight sense of pride at being accepted (similar to how many Asians feel when they have white friends; in fact, there is a similarly between the behaviour of townies and white people who have lived in places where there are a lot of non-white people that could have something to do with mostly being treated nicely wherever you go and never having to encounter such heaving crush as a local train). But by the end of college, I wasn’t that into them. They lived too far off. And they weren’t any smarter or cooler or more talented than anyone else. And the sense of entitlement always rubbed me the wrong way even when I could have been part of it. Maybe I always felt just a little subconscious about my suburban roots even then.

Once we entered the workplace, the barriers levelled out. Townies and suburban residents sat shoulder to shoulder and more often than not talent and personality won out, though connections did play a part and townies always had more of those. There were also lots of out-of-towners. In college, these were almost always adopted by the townies; after college, many of them lived in the suburbs and maybe helped bridge the divide or at least muddy the waters a bit.

I remember when I was working at the newspaper and girl joined as an intern. I recognised her immediately as one of the clique of kids from a particular school. They mixed with kids from other elite schools. At work, she was technically working under me and was always very nice and friendly. Never once did she acknowledge that we went to college together for three years.

So a person who moved to the city to work and met people from town would not quite understand the dynamic. They would not have the baggage. The townies would have grown up. But I always see the sense of entitlement beneath the surface. Curly says this is possible that our views our coloured by the fact that we came in contact with the worst of the townies, the wealthiest and the most privileged from the most elite town schools. This is possible. I see varying degrees of entitlement/smugness in most townies though. I have yet to meet one that is entirely without it, but I have met a few in whom it is barely discernable and therefore can be ignored as a minor thing.

If you are a townie, don’t feel bad. Just think, do I just occasionally feel a little superior to the unfortunates that grew up on the dark side? If the answer is yes, you need to work on curbing that instinct or at least making damn sure it doesn’t show.

Does it annoy you when people behave like an expert on your city when they have only lived there a couple of years? This, I have identified, is a thing with me. (Clearly, I have many things. A side of effect of aging is the explanation I am going with).

A few years ago, a person we used to party with (this should be a new category like frientance) annoyed the shit out of me by insinuating that I wasn’t a true Bombayite/Mumbaikar/Person from Bombay (I am going with the former) because I hadn’t been to Barbeque Nation or some such. Well, excuse me, Barbeque Nation did not exist all the 25 years I lived in Bombay and I’d wager will not exist in the next couple of years (does it exist anymore?). I do not consider attendance at the Barbecue Nations of the world true markers of having lived and thrived in the city.

Now, of course, it is truly irritating when someone takes a position on your city that you disagree with. But my possessiveness does not end there. I find it annoying, albeit less so, when people claim to be experts even when they are saying something I agree with.

Like the other day, this girl went on about how she loved Bombay but hated Bangalore. What’s not to love about that? Okay, I don’t hate Bangalore; I just think Bombay is better. (Bangalore peeps don’t kick me, I have my husband for that.) But even though she was saying something similar to my own viewpoint, I found myself rolling my eyes.

Maybe because I didn’t agree entirely with what she objected to in Bangalore. More because I didn’t think that what she loved about Bombay rang true. And partly, because I didn’t think she was entitled to claim ownership to Bombay having lived there for such a short time (which I admit is rich coming from someone who has not lived there for quite a long time but I think growing up there counts and going back every year counts for something).

I guess it’s a bit like the infatuation-love distinction. For it to be love, you have to know the object of your affection and that generally takes time. A year or two in a city is not a long time. Hong Kong is a transient place and an oft-asked question is “How long have you been here?” Even then, at one year or two, you’re still considered a newbie.

I lived in Hyderabad for two years, I was born there and I spent many vacations there growing up. But even after my two years, I don’t think I an entitled speak authoritatively about it to people who had grown up there (forgive/slap me if I have ever done so). If I wanted to, I’d air my opinions heavily seasoned with humility. Except the opinion that I didn’t believe I could ever live there happily, which two years is good enough to form.

I am more illogically this way about Goa too. With regard to Goa, I would naturally defer to people who live there. But as a Goan and one who spent practically every summer there growing up, who has family and an ancestral home there, I will claim precedence over those who flocked to Goa during the party season. I fully acknowledge that the (touristy) party scene in Goa completely threw me when I first encountered it and I am happy to be led by others when it comes to that. But beyond that, if you’re the type that goes to Goa once or twice a year to party, I probably know more about it than you do seeing as it is (at the risk of sounding senti) steeped in my blood. Just as although I am hardly typically Indian, I definitely know more about India that a foreigner who has done the odd trip to India.